A Graveyard for Lunatics, Page 3

  And then someone had read twenty or thirty of my Weird Tales, stories I had been writing since I was twelve and selling to the pulp magazines since I was twenty-one, and hired me to “write up a drama” for Roy’s beasts, all of which hyperventilated me, for I had paid my way or snuck into some nine thousand movies and had been waiting half a lifetime for someone to fire a starter’s gun to run me amok in film.

  “I want something never seen before!” said Manny Leiber that first day. “In three dimensions we fire something down to Earth. A meteor drops—”

  “Out near Meteor Crater in Arizona—” I put in. “Been there a million years. What a place for a new meteor to strike and …”

  “Out comes our new horror,” cried Manny.

  “Do we actually see it?” I asked.

  “Whatta you mean? We got to see it!”

  “Sure, but look at a film like The Leopard Man! The scare comes from night shadows, things unseen. How about Isle of the Dead when the dead woman, a catatonic, wakes to find herself trapped in a tomb?”

  “Radio shows!!” cried Manny Leiber. “Dammit, people want to see what scares them—”

  “I don’t want to argue—”

  “Don’t!” Manny glared. “Give me ten pages to scare me gutless! You—” pointing at Roy—“whatever he writes you glue together with dinosaur droppings! Now, scram! Go make faces in the mirror at three in the morning!”

  “Sir!” we cried.

  The door slammed.

  Outside in the sunlight, Roy and I blinked at each other.

  “Another fine mess you got us in, Stanley!”

  Still yelling with laughter, we went to work.

  I wrote ten pages, leaving room for monsters. Roy slapped thirty pounds of wet clay on a table and danced around it, hitting and shaping, hoping for the monster to rise up like a bubble in a prehistoric pool to collapse in a hiss of sulfurous steam and let the true horror out.

  Roy read my pages.

  “Where’s your Beast?” he cried.

  I glanced at his hands, empty but covered with blood-red clay.

  “Where’s yours?” I said.

  And now here it was, three weeks later.

  “Hey,” said Roy, “how come you’re just standing down there looking at me? Come grab a doughnut, sit, speak.” I went up, took the doughnut he offered me, and sat in the porch swing, moving alternately forward into the future and back into the past. Forward—rockets and Mars. Backward—dinosaurs and tarpits.

  And faceless Beasts all around.

  “For someone who usually talks ninety miles a minute,” said Roy Holdstrom, “you are extraordinarily quiet.”

  “I’m scared,” I said, at last.

  “Well, heck.” Roy stopped our time machine. “Speak, oh mighty one.”

  I spoke.

  I built the wall and carried the ladder and lifted the body and brought on the cold rain and then struck with the lightning to make the body fall. When I finished and the rain had dried on my forehead, I handed Roy the typed All Hallows invitation.

  Roy scanned it, then threw it on the porch floor and put his foot on it. “Somebody’s got to be kidding!”

  “Sure. But … I had to go home and burn my underwear.”

  Roy picked it up and read it again, and then stared toward the graveyard wall.

  “Why would anyone send this?”

  “Yeah. Since most of the studio people don’t even know I’m here!”

  “But, hell, last night was Halloween. Still, what an elaborate joke, hoisting a body up a ladder. Wait, what if they told you to come at midnight, but other people, at eight, nine, ten, and eleven? Scare ’em one by one! That would make sense!”

  “Only if you had planned it!”

  Roy turned sharply. “You don’t really think—?”

  “No. Yes. No.”

  “Which is it?”

  “Remember that Halloween when we were nineteen and went to the Paramount Theatre to see Bob Hope in The Cat and the Canary and the girl in front of us screamed and I glanced around and there you sat, with a rubber ghoul mask on your face?”

  “Yeah.” Roy laughed.

  “Remember that time when you called and said old Ralph Courtney, our best friend, was dead and for me to come over, you had him laid out in your house, but it was all a joke, you planned to get Ralph to put white powder all over his face and lay himself out and pretend to be dead and rise up when I came in. Remember?”

  “Yep.” Roy laughed again.

  “But I met Ralph in the street and it spoiled your joke?”

  “Sure.” Roy shook his head at his own pranks.

  “Well, then. No wonder I think maybe you put the damn body up on the wall and sent me the letter.”

  “Only one thing wrong with that,” said Roy. “You’ve rarely mentioned Arbuthnot to me. If I made the body, how would I figure you’d recognize the poor s.o.b.? It would have to be someone who really knew that you had seen Arbuthnot years ago, right?”

  “Well …”

  “Doesn’t make sense, a body in the rain, if you don’t know what in hell you’re looking at. You’ve told me about a lot of other people you met when you were a kid, hanging around the studios. If I’d made a body, it would be Rudolph Valentino or Lon Chaney, to be sure you’d recognize ’em. Correct?”

  “Correct,” I said lamely. I studied Roy’s face and looked quickly away. “Sorry. But, hell, it was Arbuthnot. I saw him two dozen times over the years, back in the thirties. At previews. Out front at the studio, here. Him and his sports cars, a dozen different ones, and limousines, three of those. And women, a few dozen, always laughing, and when he signed autographs, slipping a quarter in the autograph book before he handed it back to you. A quarter! In 1934! A quarter bought you a malted milk, a candy bar, and a ticket to a movie.”

  “That’s the kind of guy he was, was he? No wonder you remember him. How much’d he give you?”

  “He gave me a buck twenty-five, one month. I was rich. And now he’s buried over that wall where I was last night, isn’t he? Why would someone try to scare me into thinking he’d been dug up and propped on a ladder? Why all the bother? The body landed like an iron safe. Take at least two men, maybe, to handle that. Why?”

  Roy took a bite out of another doughnut. “Yeah, why? Unless someone is using you to tell the world. You were going to tell someone else, yes?”

  “I might—”

  “Don’t. You look scared right now.”

  “But why should I be? Except I got this feeling it’s more than a joke, it has some other meaning.”

  Roy stared at the wall, chewing quietly. “Hell,” Roy said at last. “You been back over to the graveyard this morning to see if the body is still on the ground? Why not go see?”

  “No!”

  “It’s broad daylight. You chicken?”

  “No, but …”

  “Hey!” cried an indignant voice. “What you two saps doing up there!?”

  Roy and I looked down off the porch.

  Manny Leiber stood there in the middle of the lawn. His Rolls-Royce was pulled up, its motor running silent and deep, and not a tremble in the frame.

  “Well?” shouted Manny.

  “We’re having a conference!” Roy said easily. “We want to move in here!”

  “You what?” Manny eyed the old Victorian house.

  “Great place to work,” Roy said, quickly. “Office for us up front, the sunporch, put in a card table, typewriter.”

  “You got an office!”

  “Offices don’t inspire. This—” I nodded around, taking the ball from Roy—“inspires. You should move all the writers out of the Writers’ Building! Put Steve Longstreet over in that New Orleans mansion to write his Civil War film. And that French bakery just beyond? Great place for Marcel Dementhon to finish his revolution, yes? Down the way, Piccadilly, heck, put all those new English writers there!”

  Manny came slowly up on the porch, his face a confused red. He looked around at the stud
io, his Rolls, and then at the two of us, as if he had caught us naked and smoking behind the barn. “Christ, not enough everything’s gone to hell at breakfast. I got two fruitcakes who want to turn Lydia Pinkham’s shack into a writers’ cathedral!”

  “Right!” said Roy. “On this very porch I conceived the scariest miniature film set in history!”

  “Cut the hyperbole.” Manny backed off. “Show me the stuff !”

  “May we use your Rolls?” said Roy.

  We used the Rolls.

  On the way to Stage 13, Manny Leiber stared straight ahead and said, “I’m trying to run a madhouse and you guys sit around on porches shooting wind. Where in hell is my Beast!? Three weeks I’ve waited—”

  “Hell,” I said reasonably, “it takes time, waiting for something really new to step out of the night. Give us breathing space, time for the old secret self to coax itself out. Don’t worry. Roy here will be working in clay. Things will rise out of that. For now, we keep the Monster in the shadows, see—”

  “Excuses!” said Manny, glaring ahead. “I don’t see. I’ll give you three more days! I want to see the Monster!”

  “What if,” I blurted suddenly, “the Monster sees you! My God! What if we do it all from the Monster’s viewpoint, looking out!? The camera moves and is the Monster, and people get scared of the Camera and—”

  Manny blinked at me, shut one eye, and muttered: “Not bad. The Camera, huh?”

  “Yeah! The Camera crawls out of the meteor. The Camera, as the Monster, blows across the desert, scaring Gila monsters, snakes, vultures, stirring the dust—”

  “I’ll be damned.” Manny Leiber gazed off at the imaginary desert.

  “I’ll be damned,” cried Roy, delighted.

  “We put an oiled lens on the Camera,” I hurried on, “add steam, spooky music, shadows, and the Hero staring into the Camera and—”

  “Then what?”

  “If I talk it I won’t write it.”

  “Write it, write it!”

  We stopped at Stage 13. I jumped out, babbling. “Oh, yeah. I think I should do two versions of the script. One for you. One for me.”

  “Two?” yelled Manny. “Why?”

  “At the end of a week I hand in both. You get to choose which is right.”

  Manny eyed me suspiciously, still half in, half out of the Rolls.

  “Crap! You’ll do your best work on your idea!”

  “No. I’ll do my damnedest for you. But also my damnedest for me. Shake?”

  “Two Monsters for the price of one? Do it! C’mon!”

  Outside the door Roy stopped dramatically. “You ready for this? Prepare your minds and souls.” He held up both beautiful artists’ hands, like a priest.

  “I’m prepared, dammit. Open!”

  Roy flung open the outside and then the inside door and we stepped into total darkness.

  “Lights, dammit!” said Manny.

  “Hold on—” whispered Roy.

  We heard Roy move in the dark, stepping carefully over unseen objects.

  Manny twitched nervously.

  “Almost ready,” intoned Roy across a night territory. “Now …”

  Roy turned on a wind machine, low. First there was a whisper like a giant storm, which brought with it weather from the Andes, snow murmuring off the shelves of the Himalayas, rain over Sumatra, a jungle wind headed for Kilimanjaro, the rustle of skirts of tide along the Azores, a cry of primitive birds, a flourish of bat wings, all blended to lift your gooseflesh and drop your mind down trapdoors toward—

  “Light!” cried Roy.

  And now the light was rising on Roy Holdstrom’s landscapes, on vistas so alien and beautiful it broke your heart and mended your terror and then shook you again as shadows in great lemming mobs rushed over the microscopic dunes, tiny hills, and miniature mountains, fleeing a doom already promised but not yet arrived.

  I looked around with delight. Roy had read my mind again. The bright and dark stuff I threw on the midnight screens inside my camera obscura head he had stolen and blueprinted and built even before I had let them free with my mouth. Now, turnabout, I would use his miniature realities to flesh out my most peculiar odd script. My hero could hardly wait to sprint through this tiny land.

  Manny Leiber stared, flabbergasted.

  Roy’s dinosaur land was a country of phantoms revealed in an ancient and artificial dawn.

  Enclosing this lost world were huge glass plates on which Roy had painted primordial junglescapes, tar swamps in which his creatures sank beneath skies as fiery and bitter as Martian sunsets, burning with a thousand shades of red.

  I felt the same thrill I had felt when, in high school, Roy had taken me home and I had gasped as he swung his garage doors wide on, not automobiles, but creatures driven by ancient needs to rise, claw, chew, fly, shriek, and die through all our childhood nights.

  And here, now, on Stage 13, Roy’s face burned above a whole miniature continent that Manny and I were stranded on.

  I tiptoed across it, fearful of destroying any tiny thing. I reached a single covered sculpture platform and waited.

  Surely this must be his greatest Beast, the thing he had set himself to rear when, in our twenties, we had visited the primal corridors of our local natural history museum. Surely somewhere in the world this Beast had hidden in dusts, treading char, lost in God’s coal mines under our very tread! Hear! oh hear that subway sound, his primitive heart, and volcanic lungs shrieking to be set free! And had Roy set him free?

  “I’ll be goddamned.” Manny Leiber leaned toward the hidden monster. “Do we see it now?”

  “Yes,” Roy said, “that’s it.”

  Manny touched the cover.

  “Wait,” said Roy. “I need one more day.”

  “Liar!” said Manny. “I don’t believe you got one goddamn bastard thing under that rag!”

  Manny took two steps. Roy jumped three.

  At which instant, the Stage 13 set phone rang.

  Before I could move, Manny grabbed it.

  “Well?” he cried.

  His face changed. Perhaps it got pale, perhaps not, but it changed.

  “I know that.” He took a breath. “I know that, too.” Another breath; his face was getting red now. “I knew that half an hour ago! Say, god damn it to hell, who is this!?”

  A wasp buzzed at the far end of the line. The phone had been hung up.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  Manny hurled the phone and I caught it.

  “Wrap me in a wet sheet, someone, this is a madhouse! Where was I? You!”

  He pointed at both of us.

  “Two days, not three. You damn well get the Beast out of the catbox and into the light or—”

  At which point the outer door opened. A runt of a guy in a black suit, one of the studio chauffeurs, stood in a glare of light.

  “Now what?” Manny shouted.

  “We got it here but the motor died. We just got it fixed.”

  “Move out, then, for Christ’s sake!”

  Manny charged at him with one fist raised, but the door slammed, the runt was gone, so Manny had to turn and direct his explosion at us.

  “I’m having your final checks made up, ready for Friday afternoon. Deliver, or you’ll never work again, either of you.”

  Roy said quietly, “Do we get to keep it? Our Green Town, Illinois, offices? Now that you see these results you got from us fruitcakes?”

  Manny paused long enough to look back at the strange lost country like a kid in a fireworks factory.

  “Christ,” he breathed, forgetting his problems for a moment, “I got to admit you really did it.” He stopped, angry at his own praise, and shifted gears. “Now cut the cackle and move your buns!”

  And—bum! He was gone, too.

  Standing in the midst of our ancient landscape, lost in time, Roy and I stared at one another.

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” said Roy. Then, “You really going to do it? Write two versions of the script? One for
him, one for us?”

  “Yep! Sure.”

  “How can you do that?”

  “Heck,” I said, “I been in training for fifteen years, wrote one hundred pulp stories, one a week, in one hundred weeks, two script outlines in two days? Both brilliant? Trust me.”

  “Okay, I do, I do.” There was a long pause, then he said, “Do we go look?”

  “Look? At what?”

  “That funeral you saw. In the rain. Last night. Over the wall. Wait.”

  Roy walked over to the big airlock door. I followed. He opened the door. We looked out.

  An ornately carved black hearse with crystal windows was just pulling away down the studio alley, making a big racket with a bad engine.

  “I bet I know where it’s going,” said Roy.

  8

  We drove around on Gower Street in Roy’s old beat-up 1927 tin lizzie.

  We didn’t see the black funeral hearse go into the graveyard, but as we pulled up out front and parked, the hearse came rolling out among the stones.

  It passed us, carrying a casket into the full sunlight of the street.

  We turned to watch the black limousine whisper out the gate with no more sound than a polar exhalation from off the northern floes.

  “That’s the first time I ever saw a casket in a funeral car go out of a cemetery. We’re too late!”

  I spun about to see the last of the limo heading east, back toward the studio.

  “Too late for what?”

  “Your dead man, dummy! Come on!”

  We were almost to the cemetery back wall when Roy stopped.

  “Well, by God, there’s his tomb.”

  I looked at what Roy was looking at, about ten feet above us, in marble:

  J. C. ARBUTHNOT, 1884–1934 R.I.P.

  It was one of those Greek-temple huts in which they bury fabulous people, with an iron lattice gate locked over a heavy wood-and-bronze inner door.

  “He couldn’t have come out of there, could he?”

  “No, but something got on that ladder and I knew his face. And someone else knew I would recognize that face so I was invited to come see.”

  “Shut up. Come on.”